Long-winded description aside, the Halo Game Services job listing is for a software engineer, and among the prerequisite experience listings is “experience in MMO development” noted in “ideal experience.”

Gamespot reminded us that when Ensemble Studios was shuttered, it was revealed the team had been working on a Halo MMO, codenamed both Titan and Orion which was canned in 2007.

Could 343 be looking to scrape up the pieces or start afresh on a Halo MMO? Only it knows for sure at this point, but it sounds more tech than MMO to us, as 343 could just be looking for someone with experience in MMOs due to server issues, stability, or something less exciting and technical: “The Halo Game Services team is working on building the next generation of backend services to power Halo 4 and our new game saga.”

Speaking to Shacknews, Ensemble tech boss Dave Pottinger has outlined the background for the firm’s canned MMO, and revealed that the game was green-lit and had staffed up to 40 employees before is was axed in an exec changeover.

From the interview:

What were the circumstances behind the Halo MMO?

Pottinger: Ensemble has been wanting to make an MMO for a long time. That was in production for a long time. The Halo IP was a great IP to launch an MMO with. Microsoft… hasn’t had the best track record with those.

And we worked on it for a long time–we had staffed up an almost-40 person team. And then there was some reorganization at Microsoft, and the new bosses thought it wasn’t the best idea anymore. It had actually been green-lit, and then it got cancelled after that.

So you guys were feeling good about it?

Pottinger: Yeah, we were happy with it. It was a long road to go, and we had proved the gameplay we wanted to prove.

It actually turned out–we ended up reusing a lot of the people. We had hired people who were excited about making a Halo game, and we used them on Phoenix–Phoenix is the Halo Wars codename. And a lot of that stuff that we picked up was able to be reused. So we didn’t lose everything. It wasn’t all wasted.

From the screenshots that were leaked, it seemed very World of Warcraft-esque. Was that your model?

Pottinger: Yeah. It’s a popular one.

Was the concept such that there were Covenant and UNSC factions, in the same way that WoW has Horde and Alliance?

Pottinger: It was more broken up than that. The Covenant weren’t quite the Covenant yet.

That idea of that sort of stylized approach to Halo was something that we were very interested in, in terms of the art. Some of the art that leaked out wasn’t art that was actually in the game, so people were a little more torqued than they needed to be.

But it felt very Halo–we had a combat demo that felt like a very action-oriented MMO, but still had that MMO depth. So it was very analogous to the RTS that we worked on.

So you didn’t have plans to go for a more FPS-style game.

Pottinger: It was definitely more of a classic MMO, but it still had that very action feel. Definitely more actiony than WoW.

Speaking to GI at TGS, Bungie PR boss Brian Jarrard has claimed that Bungie only had a vague idea anyone was working on a Halo MMO, and that creating one would be “pretty challenging” thanks to the necessary creation of “a whole new layer of fiction” in the Halo universe.

“They are like our lunchtime discussions at the studio,” he said. “A Halo MMO wasn’t something that at the studio we had a lot of preview on. We’d heard rumblings and on paper, if someone says ‘Let’s take Halo, plus Warcraft, equals dollar signs…’

“So it was interesting when that whole thing came to light, there was more there than we ever really thought there was. I don’t know, we’ve had a lot of heated discussions – there’s a big, vast, rich universe, but then again it’s hard for me to imagine.

“Everybody wants to be Master Chief, they all want to be the Spartan. You’d have to create a whole new layer of fiction and new characters that don’t currently exist – not that it couldn’t be done,” he added.

“I don’t know if I would want to invest and become a Warthog mechanic in a garage, when all my friends were out there kicking ass on the front lines. I’m sure there’s probably enough there to work with where something could of come of it, but I think it would have been pretty challenging.”

Following the recent announcement that Microsoft-owned Age Of Empires creator Ensemble Studios would close after the completion of Halo Wars, Gamasutra has discovered that a now-canceled Halo MMO was in development at the studio, unearthing prototype UI and level screenshots of the Ensemble-developed project.

The prototype art, which was at one point made available on an Ensemble-linked online artist portfolio website, further confirms previous rumors that the studio was working on an MMO based on the Bungie-created sci-fi franchise.